Typically, when a person requires to initiate services in an enterprise, such as, by way of example, telephone service, email service, voice mail, or perhaps long distance capabilities, the requester would have to complete one or more paper forms. These forms have been necessary, and still are necessary in most instances, because of approval levels required to be signed off on by management. Once approved, the forms would then be used to initiate service, and in some cases would be used to follow up on a service at a later time. Again, in the typical scenario, these forms would move from person to person and would act as the trigger to get something done.
Such a process is not only time consuming, but results in inefficiencies because people must send the forms properly to the next stage in the process and often a simple misspelling of a name or the transposition of a routing address number could result in delays in the provision of the service. Moreover, vacations, personnel changes, distractions, faulty filing, in short, any number of factors could (and do) go wrong causing delays and added cost and frustration.